A look at the short and medium wave "hobby" or pirate radio scene in Europe from an English viewpoint

Thursday, 9 February 2017

Why DO We Listen To AM?

After reading reading Medium Wave Dxer's excellent Blog post: "Why do we listen to AM in this day and age?" I reflected on why I continue almost daily to pursue this hobby of ours.The answer was reinforced yesterday evening when I experienced the sheer thrill of hearing the sound of Dutch free radio station Luxemburg for the first time direct to my SDRplay on 261,8 kHz. I listened and identified a couple of tunes - not by any means the best quality, and difficult to listen to and enjoy the music, but reception was there!I will not send off for a QSL; that is not my main source of enjoyment, but the excitement I had last evening was as real as I was when I first heard Canada on the Medium Wave back in the early 1960s.Yes, I suppose it is also about collecting - you only have to look at my logs to know that I like to collect station names, but there are other facets to our hobby. As David refers to in his excellent article, it is also about telling the station operator of the success of his efforts to get the signal out into the ether. Luxemburg said he was running 8 watts on the LW frequency and crossing the North Sea on that power is a fair achievement!I would most certainly have stayed longer and listened to the music, had the signal been stronger. I have had many evenings recently where I have had a chat with station operators or had to concentrate hard to understand a station from the Netherlands talking to me in Dutch, or maybe waiting for an hour or so to get a station ID... these are real pleasures and yes I am proud to still listen to AM! The article from Medium Wave DXer can be found here: mwfreeradio.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/the-operator-of-longtime-british-am.html

2 comments:

Thanks for taking the time to write about your fascination with AM Terry and for the link to my words. And I'm very jealous that you have heard Luxemburg on LW... I have often tried but not managed to catch the signal. I will have to try harder!

I was totally in agreement with all that you said in the your blog entry, David. Thank you for putting into words how I feel about SW and MW listening! Sorry I "bagged" Luxemburg; nobody was more surprised than me!